Friday, September 24, 2010

First Introductory Post

This site is intended as an introduction of myself to the people that I meet face to face out in the real world. A lot of the articles that I write are based on where I am in my spiritual journey.  This is different than the standard what kind of job and how long have I been married type story that most people are able to use to introduce themselves. I don't know where to start or how much to say. I do know that the other articles that I have to post are waiting for this one.

Career and employment are pretty straightforward, or at least to start. I got a Chemical Engineering degree from the University of Calgary in 1981.  Financed by a few student loans but mainly from working on the drilling rigs in the summer. My family was in the "oil patch" and these connections got me my first job, and I wouldn't have been able to keep it if it wasn't for these connections since I was woefully inadequate in the physical department to start but perseverance  eventually made me strong enough. After I had my degree I got a job as a Drilling Engineer for BP. I was working in the heavy oil section and later transferred to conventional drilling. There are some details here that I will save for a separate post. After six years I was called into the office and given the "technically you're the best engineer I've ever had work for me, but, you have an attitude problem and we can't trust you to always do what is in the best interests of BP." They didn't cheat me out of severance pay so I was happy.

I didn't even look for another job but immediately signed up at university in the computer science department. Experiences with the system service department on the last job were so frustrating that I never wanted to have to depend on them again. I was also taking a minor in communications, as in speeches, rhetoric, etc. Between second and third year I took the summer off to learn C and wrote a prototype for a distributed hypertext system. I saw the potential and I was going to use it to bankroll the counter-culture. This was in the summer of 1989, the same time that Tim Berners-Lee was laying down the foundation for HTML, which I didn't find out about until months later. One thing led to another, add some psychic inflation with rupture into the collective unconscious as Jung would say, three weeks without sleep and I was pretty much screwed for the rest of my life -- (but if I could go back and do things different I wouldn't change a thing.) With great difficulty I managed to finish my degree over the next two years, but I had timetable conflicts that prevented the communication minor.

Worked for TransCanada Pipelines for a couple of years. Very frustrating. They had contempt for software design, that was overcompensated for by a lot, an awful lot, of time spent on screen appearance and cosmetics. I was told it didn't matter much what was on the inside since they would be rewriting the programs next year anyway. We had the largest in-house computer department in town. I found out that they were a regulated company, being a monopoly and all, and the price they could charge was set as a percentage above expenses. The higher the expenses, the higher the profit. It all made sense.

I thought I had enough money to last until the global economic meltdown, the one which still hasn't happened, though it looms ever closer. Plus I had this book to write, and a mission, etc.  So I took a vow that I would starve to death in the freezing rain besides some dumpster before I would ever let a corporation benefit from my talents again. You would think this would motivate me to get the book written. You'd think. The crash and burn was a long drawn out affair.

Father gave me enough money to move to Vancouver in 1996 so I could crash and burn again out of sight. Which I did, until I was rescued by social services. Turns out that one of the reasons I had no energy was that my thyroid had quit working somewhere along the line. Got that fixed up with daily pills, and now I'm on mental disability with a part time job at Windsor Meats making sausages. It supplies my daily bread and I live a monastic lifestyle. I'm a contemplative, a monk without an order. I do lots of charity work. I have an active religious life. I still haven't written the book.

That is a pretty quick and dirty summary of the outer life. The inner life of O.V. is more complicated and I'll get back to it in posts here and there over the next few months/years.

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